Page 52 - Breeding and regulatory opportunities, Renaud

Chapter 2

structured interviews were held with individuals from each stakeholder category,

using a checklist developed to ensure consistent coverage of the main themes

discussed. The preliminary interviews were followed by 74 one-hour in-depth

interviews (Kvale, 1996) with individuals or representatives of organizations,

who were identiied by the principal researcher and the respondents in the irst

round of interviews for their high level of inluence within each stakeholder

category. All stakeholders identiied for interviews agreed to participate in

the study. They included organic certiiers (n=8), small-scale organic growers

(n=26), large scale growers (n=14), organic food buyers (n=5), representatives

of formal seed companies who are involved in organic and/or conventional

seed production (n=10), non-proit organization representatives (n=6), and

policy and legislative body personnel (n=5) with regulatory inluence. Each

interview began by presenting to the respondent a written statement of the

organic seed regulation, followed by exploration of a set of questions common

to all respondents. These were complemented by questions appropriate to each

stakeholder category’s speciic interests. Information from the preliminary and

in-depth interviews was recorded as written notes taken during or immediately

after each interview. Qualitative analysis (Denzin and Lincoln 1994) of the notes

was carried out manually, using (1) the tools of content analysis to identify, group

and analyse the key concerns expressed by the respondents (Krippendorf,

2004), and (2) the tools of discourse analysis (Patton, 1980), to identify key

concepts and the interconnections between them, and the interconnections

between the changing regulatory context and the discourse.

Tracking and analysis of organizational developments

Monitoring of the organic seed regulatory process continued through to 2013

and included the collection and analysis of grey literature such as successive

policy documents that were created and circulated by the stakeholders, and

participant observation by the principal researcher who attended key meetings

throughout the study period. Narrative analysis of the history of organizational

developments was carried out by (1) mapping participants’ changing concerns,

concepts and contexts, (2) identifying key decision points in rule-setting and

implementation processes from the stakeholders’ perspectives, (3) mapping

emergent networks and coalitions of interest, and (4) by documenting how

resources of various kinds were mobilized by the stakeholders in response to

the changing understanding of the regulatory requirements.

34